The escatological in the work of the Mozambican Deusa d’África

Body-object and Body-end

Abstract

This article investigates the function and impact of scatological imagery in the work of Mozambican writer Deusa d’África, understanding it as an articulation between the finitude of the body and social fragmentation. Using an analytical-interpretative approach, key works by the author were examined, such as A Voz das Minhas Entranhas (2014a), Ao Encontro da Vida ou da Morte (2014b), Cães à Estrada e Poetas ao Morgue (2022), and Metamiserismo (2024), focusing on the analysis of poems and excerpts that highlight the use of bodily, coprological, and viscerally subversive imagery. The methodology consisted of analyzing these images in light of theoretical concepts of scatology, especially drawing on the work of Francisco Noa. As a result, it was found that Deusa d’África constructs a scatological poetics marked by the ambivalence between destruction and creation, where the grotesque and the abject are transmuted into aesthetic and political potency. Her writing reveals a literature of resistance that subverts conventions and denounces colonial, patriarchal, and social violence, transforming the body and its fluids into critical allegories of identity and social disintegration, but also into matrices for new forms of subjectivity, promoting an aesthetic and existential reinvention of contemporary Mozambican literature.